Sinéad O'Connor with Allyson McCabe

This week, we fight the real enemy with Allyson McCabe.
 
Here's where to find Allyson online here.

You can find Allyson's book Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters here.

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Transcript

Sarah: We've come so far, but yeah, women weren't allowed to be angry until probably what, 1991? 

Allyson: Maybe not even today. I don't know. We could have that discussion. 

Sarah: That’s a great point.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about Sinead O'Connor. We are learning about Sinead O'Connor today from Allyson McCabe, who is coming out with a book next month called, Why Sinead O'Connor Matters. I'm excited to share it with you. I'm excited to get you in on the ground floor of why Sinead O'Connor matters. Because if there's anything You're Wrong About listeners care about, in my opinion, it is being the first among their friends to know about new Sinead O'Connor books. And this is my gift to you today. 

Sinead O'Connor is someone whose story people have been asking for from the beginning of this show's life, and it's a story that I've always wanted to do and been fascinated by. It is always fascinating to me when an entire person's complex life and career are compressed into a single moment in time. 

Because we're talking about a nineties media story that was seen as a comedy at the time and parodied endlessly in late night jokes, we do, of course, have multiple trigger warnings for this show. Those things somehow always go together. And in this case, we're going to be talking about child abuse and parental abuse. We're going to be talking about the sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, and we're also going to be talking about suicide. If that's going to be tough for you, then please listen with care if you want to proceed, and we are hopefully here to help you get through it. 

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Here's the episode. 

*recording* 

“Confidence in the victory of good over evil. Fight the real enemy.”

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes after almost five years, we finally give you the thing you've been asking for. And today we are talking about Sinead O'Connor with Allyson McCabe. Hello. 

Allyson: Hello. Thanks for having me on.

Sarah: Thank you so much for being on. Allyson, you have a book out, what's it called? And when is it out? And can you tell people a little bit about that?

Allyson: Yeah. The book is, Why Sinead O'Connor Matters, and it is on University of Texas Press, and it will be coming out on May 23rd. 

Sarah: And now that we've done this episode, I get to go read my advanced reader's copy that is in my living room, because I no longer have to keep myself in the dark. And I'm so excited to read it. Thank you so much for writing it. 

Allyson: Thank you so much. 

Sarah: This is a topic that I think people have been asking for since before the podcast even existed, when the idea of doing a show about correcting or expanding cultural myths centered on the eighties and 90’s. I think one of the first things you think about is Sinead O'Connor, and specifically the cultural fossil she left behind, which was to my memory performing on Saturday Night Live, and then tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II and saying, “Fight the real enemy”, I think? And I believe this was in reference to Catholic church sexual abuse scandals, although I don't know if the public knew that at the time. And I feel like Andrew Dice Clay had something to say about it.  

And I was born in 1988, and so what I was taught about this as a tween watching VH1 Countdowns, which is something I talk about a lot on this show. This is another topic that was in VH1's 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock hosted by Mark McGrath. And I feel like it was treated as this notorious piece of video that could never be replayed and Lauren Michaels had forbidden it, and it wasn't allowed to be seen by human eyes. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, what the fuck? This seems, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but this makes me want to be a conspiracy theorist about it. 

And then also I know that part of the tragedy of this is that whatever happened to her career because of it, and it can't have been good, Sinead O'Connor is so much bigger than this moment. And I think that it's always harmful to a person when their life is shrunk down to any moment. And that's what I bring to this, what Mark McGrath told me.

Allyson: I will say that Mark McGrath is wrong about Sinead. 

Sarah: I love it. I love it already. Fighting words with Mark McGrath. All right, please take me on this ride. 

Allyson: I should start from the outset by saying I was not a lifelong Sinead fan. My knowledge of Sinead was also pretty limited. Shaved hair, had that big song, Nothing Compare 2 U that was written by Prince. And of course the video where you see the tear.

Sarah: Great song. 

Allyson: Great song, but a pop song, and I wasn't really into pop music at the time when it came out, so I didn't really know much about her outside of that video was everywhere. And then of course, it happened on Saturday Night Live tearing the photo over the Pope. Which actually, you're right in the sense that you can dig around and you can find on YouTube the whole video now, but for a long time you couldn't. And it just was like that still photograph of her, looking angry, ripping a photograph. 

Sarah: And it's like you can probably find videos of people being beheaded on YouTube if you look around for long enough and catch it before it gets taken down. So this makes it feel like we were like, we can't let anyone see Sinead O'Connor, this very sincere young artist tearing up a picture of the Pope because it's harmful and I think that in a free society you should be able to tear up a picture of the Pope on TV. Is this so out there?

Allyson: I think to understand what was happening, you have to rewind a few years and see how she got to 1992. I was working on a different story, having nothing to do with Sinead and I happened to notice that there was this Fiona Apple video, which led me to multiple Fiona Apple videos. And the last one was her responding to a post that Sinead had made on Facebook in 2017 from a New Jersey Travelodge, in which she was in deep emotional distress. And Sinead was talking about that in that video. And Fiona was responding to that, reaching out, saying, “You're my friend and I support you”, that kind of thing. 

I started to think, what happened to Sinead O'Connor after SNL? And I went back and I reexamined her music. I didn't even know she kept making music. She made lots of great music after that, no one heard it. And as I went and did that, I realized the more I was looking at Sinead, the more I was really seeing a reflection of the culture. And the more that I did that, the more I realized that I was also having to think about my relationship to that both professionally as a journalist and also personally as a human. 

Sarah: At what stage in your life in journalism were you in when this topic appeared to you? And did you evaluate your part in media when thinking about this?

Allyson: Yeah, definitely. I should say I didn't start out as a journalist. Way back in the beginning of life I thought I would be a musician. But then I went to college, and it seemed like that was a safer thing to do. And I was studying gender theory and stuff like that, cultural theory. Got a PhD, taught at Yale for 14 years. But I was pretty unhappy actually doing that. People really try hard to get into Yale. I tried really hard to get out of Yale. 

Sarah: Just like Ron Reagan. 

Allyson: Yeah.  I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I started doing these sorts of local commentaries for the local NPR affiliate, just about whatever was happening in my life. And I was like, oh, this sounds cool. I want to learn reporting. And then I started to do some sort of music stories for them, and then I ended up pitching to NPR and that was how I made the path out of academia, back to music through journalism. Yeah, I was pretty unhappy, but I was about to turn 40 at that time. And I was like, if I don't do it now, if I don't leave now, like I never will. 

Sarah: You'll sink deeper into the couch.

Allyson: Totally. found this exit ramp and that was radio and it really meant something to me. Now that said, when I first started working on this stuff, most of the editors who you pitched stories to were like older white guys and a lot of what they thought was important was stuff about older white guys. 

Sarah: Yeah. I have a similar experience where I was starting off as a freelance writer in the early 20-teens, I guess the “teenies”. And I had editors who I loved, who I worked with, who were mostly white women like myself, who were very junior and who had to, I think, report up to white men. And so they could go to bat for my ideas, but only to an extent. It never occurred to me that this was why all of my ideas were deemed like, who cares? What about Amy Fisher? Didn't we fuck up the reporting on that one? It was like, no, who cares? And who doesn't care about that? That's who doesn't care. 

Allyson: I started to think about what can I do? And I started to arrive at the idea that journalism is really a lot about a kind of illusion of neutrality, as opposed to just actual neutrality. 

Sarah: Because don't you think that there is no actual neutrality? I think that you can get pretty close. I think you can get to 93% neutrality, but you have to be transparent, this is not neutral. And for me to present it as that is asking you to cultivate a higher degree of trust in me than is fair. And that's why I periodically should say look, I'm not claiming this is the truth, this show's truth is the thoughts of some bimbo.

Allyson: I think it's really important to be informed. I think that being informed, part of your role is you're going to hear stuff that maybe there's contradictions, there's omissions, there's all kinds of things happening. And partially your job is to judge and to try to make judgements about what is the best version of the story. Accuracy is important, but at the same time, I feel a lot of times we are like, oh, curiosity, that's the reporter's toolbox. What about compassion? I think compassion also has to be part of it too. And what's at stake, not just for the people in the story, but in you as the storyteller. I think recognizing that actually will probably get you closer to the thing that journalism calls neutrality than just this idea that anything that isn't universal is a problem. 

Sarah: And not to make everything about Tanya Harding, but what if everything is about Tanya Harding? And I feel like the sort of mainstream media frenzies of the nineties were so interesting because it was respectable mainstream media could report on a big topic by being like, all these tabloids are reporting on this topic. We're not reporting on the topic, we're reporting on the tabloids, reporting on the topic. 

Allyson: Oh. I think this still happens to some degree with social media. The thing about Sinead, and I think this is covered well in Kathryn Ferguson's documentary, Nothing Compares, which is now streaming on Showtime. Sinead was coming out of Ireland at a certain time. It was a Catholic theocracy. And her mother was very devout and abusive, horrifically abusive. And divorce wasn't legal, but her parents separated when she was about seven or eight. And her father spent years and then eventually was awarded custody of the children, which was very rare and still probably is. By that point, she'd endured a lot of hardship and she was pickpocketing people and shoplifting and acting out in all kinds of ways. 

Sarah: Little Sinead O'Connor saying, “You've got to pick a pocket or two.” 

Allyson: Yeah. Sent off to a Mackenzian Catholic Girls School, where an interesting thing happened. Which was she had this nun called Sister Margaret, who really saw in her as wow, she needs an emotional outlet. And she really loved her. Not in spite of the fact that she was rebellious, but because she was rebellious. And she bought Sinead her first guitar and a book of Bob Dylan songs, which I'm going to get to in a second. Because that's going to be an important part of the story. And even a leather jacket she won her from this sort of punk rock shop in Dublin. And what she was really doing is giving her a chance to have self-esteem and identity. 

Sarah: That makes me wonder as someone who identified, from a young age as a musician yourself, I wonder about the sense of identity that music can give you as a teenager, you're because you're born and you grow up in a family and you grow up in a culture, and it feels like music is one of the first things that you can turn to that's like, there are whole other worlds out there for you. 

Allyson: A hundred percent talk about this in the book. But for me it was like, I think the first thing was like Blondie, Debbie Harry was on the Muppet Show when I was 10. I was just mesmerized. Of course I had rockstar fantasies that all came from that. And then later, of course, MTV happens. 

Here's the thing about Sinead. Her older brother, who's a well-known novelist, he had brought home all these Bob Dylan records. And for her, the thing that saved her was music and God, and specifically Dylan during his Christian era. He had all these albums that she would listen to on repeat. And she really felt that she could be like Bob Dylan, a protest singer, that God had allowed her to survive and that she was going to use her voice to kind of be a voice for other people, right? 

When her first album came out, it's 1987. There's no lane for a female protest singer. There's no lane for female anger, right? That comes a little later. That comes with like Hole, that comes with Alanis Morrissette, You Ought To Know. In 1987, that's not happening.

Sarah: You can be horny as a woman, and I feel like we were like, wow, women are allowed to be horny now. It's legal for women to be horny. Incredible. We've come so far, but yeah, but women weren't allowed to be angry until probably, what, 1991?

Allyson: Maybe not even today. I don't know. We can have that discussion.

Sarah: It's a great point.

Allyson: Certainly not in ‘87. In fact, when the album came out, which by the way, she had two different versions of the album cover, one in which she was singing, and so her mouth was open, her hair shaved, her record label was like, we can't put that out in America. You look too angry. So instead they did a new one where her hands are crossed, and her eyes are closed, and she looks very demure. So anger was a real problem at that time, but she had a lot of it. Righteous anger, Saint Augustine says what? Anger is the first step towards courage or something like that, that applied in her case. But like me, because she's a few years older than I am, basically the same generation. You read Rolling Stone and you got these ideas like, oh, you, you didn't really see gender because women weren't really in there that much. She was like, I could be like John Lennon. I could be like Bob Dylan. You weren't sitting there going, aside from the fact that I'm a woman, it wasn't a conscious thing. 

Sarah: Yeah. I think that there's a special experience in growing up and forgetting all the reasons why you can't do all the things you want to do because of your gender. And the time before, if it happens, you're rudely brought down to earth about it. Because it's one thing to not be able to express anger as a woman making music in a way that's widely distributed, but there's so much else that that also makes true. And one of them is that you can't really have any political consciousness, right? Because how can you do anything in protest without anger being available to you?

Allyson: Definitely. So in her case, she's getting these lessons at the girls' school. There’s a teacher's brother who's getting married. She invites Sinead who's 13, 14, somewhere like that, an adolescent to perform at the wedding. It just so happens that the guy who's getting married, the groom, is the brother of the music teacher. He's in a band that has these deep connections to U2 and everything that's happening in Ireland around that time. It's the start of her career, but it's also the start of her idea that she could be somebody, her identity is wrapped up in that. So I think she gets a record deal when she's still really young. Her first album came out in 1987. She fired the producer who was working on it, somebody the record label appointed, but he wanted to give it a Van Morrison sound, soft and ethereal, mystical kind of that era of Van Morrison. 

Sarah: How old is she in 1987? 

Allyson: Let's see. She's born in 66, so I'm going to say she's 20, 21, something like that. I'll have to do the math. Not to be wrong, but young.

Sarah: I still really struggled with being like, hey, this isn't working out creatively. We shouldn't do this project together. Or it is in a sense sometimes easier to stand up for your work than for yourself and you can trick yourself because your work is yourself. And look at that. You stood up for yourself. But I'm very impressed by that. 

Allyson: She called him like a fucking old hippie or something and she was, and they told her they wanted her to be sexy because that was the way you got your thing going. So that was where she had a mohawk at first and then she had it shaved completely. Got rid of whatever she was wearing and started wearing the whole thing you picture her in, the Doc Marten's boots and the ripped-up jeans, the black halter top. That all happens and she's starting to put together her own identity outside of being just this abused child. She wants to be somebody powerful and represent that. 

And she gets pregnant and she's making the record. She has a relationship with the drummer and the record label wants her to end the pregnancy because they tell her how you're going to tour and you're going to throw everything in the trash, ,nd we spent all this money on the record. She's like, fuck you. So that was huge. And all of those songs on that first album, which was called A Lion and the Cobra, it was a musical memoir. They're so powerful, but they're going to try to figure out how do we put her out there in a world where she doesn't really conform to what we think of as a sort of pop princess? And she's terrible at interviews. She's very shy at this time. The interviews are awkward.

Sarah: And I'm sure they're asking her wonderfully asinine questions like they always do, “So, Si-need”. 

Allyson: Totally. Yeah. And so what happens is it's on college radio and she gets broken on MTV because even though she's really bad at interviews, she teams up with this guy John Mayberry, who's a director who can really represent what makes her so powerful and so different and her voice is incredible. And she gets some traction. ‘89 Grammys is the first time she's on U.S. primetime television. She had once been on like David Letterman before that, but this is her first appearance where the whole world is watching. This is when people watch the Grammys. 

Sarah: Yeah. They used to be like, oh, maybe Metallica will do something. Is this for the, Nothing Compares 2 U video? 

Allyson: No, this is before that. She's up for best female rock vocal performance. She's nominated. She doesn't get the award, but she's there to perform that night. She's doing Mandinka. That's the video that Fiona Apple is reacting to. 

And here's the thing. From the very start of her career, even before she broke and became famous, she was very interested in rap music and on her first U.S. tour had local rap artists opening all the dates and enlisted MC Lyte, who was just 16 at the time, and had one song to do a collaboration with her on, I Want Your Hands On Me, which was a big video on MTV. And in the ‘89 Grammys was the first time the Academy was going to present an award for rap, but they weren't going to televise the award. The idea was that at first, they wanted to dismiss rap as either a fad or dangerous. But it got to the point where they couldn't ignore it. 

So they were going to do the award, but they weren't going to televise it, and that was not okay with her. So when she appeared she wore in her hair - which was shaved almost totally bald - but it was the logo for Public Enemy, which is the guy in the cross hairs, which Chuck D said represents the black man in America, in her hair. Like the big yellow, there it is. Anybody can see it. And that was her expression of solidarity with the artists who had been erased from the program. Not just the ones who were nominated, but by extension all the artists whose videos were not played on MTV, they were not on the radio with other pop music, even though the genre of rap was popular.

Sarah: And she's forcing them to be televised in a way, because the camera can't show her without showing the Public Enemy logo. 

Allyson: And that was her first big, she could have just gone that night and lip synced and just bowed politely and yes, I'm here to be a pop star, but she didn't. This is what made her great. But this is also what made her dangerous. 

Sarah: I feel like in a past life she would've been like a labor organizer, you know?

Allyson: Something but not a pop star. And you know what? People are watching this and there's not just girls and women, but a lot of girls and women like all around the country going whoa. It was really powerful. Because she just didn't give a shit. 

Sarah: I feel like the way that people are kept in line normally is, this sea is very choppy and it's very cold, and this lifeboat is very tippy, and you'd better just go with the flow. Yeah. And not realize that you've been sexually assaulted because you just have to keep letting it happen to do your job or whatever it is. And that Sinead O'Connor in response to this is almost like, because the situation is so precarious, I will give less of a shit. 

Allyson: Right. Now you're talking about something having to do with the psychology of abuse. Which is the idea that like, if it happens to you, just shut up, don't tell anybody, nobody's going to believe you. And even if they believe you, everything's just going to be worse once it's out in the open and it's all going to come back onto you so just carry on. 

Sarah: And it's based on a philosophy of no one can ever be in power, but the abuser. And you can't imagine such a world which is reasonable. It makes total sense to end up with that belief system and that's how we protect ourselves. But then it's like you end up, you're an adult and there's a record label and you got to. And I feel like it can also be a direct response to abuse just to come with full force at everything that resembles that in your life as an adult. 

Allyson: A hundred percent.

*recording* 

Let’s let her talk about it. Please welcome, Sinead O'Connor.

“I believe very much that the music industry as a whole operates mainly it's concerned mainly with material success. And a lot of artists do, I think, are responsible for encouraging the belief among people that material success will make them happy. And I think one of the ways that the industry encourages commercial success and materiality is by having award ceremonies, which very much honor those who have achieved material success rather than people who have told the truth or who've done anything to pass information to people or to inspire people or to, just be truthful about anything?”

Allyson: So ‘90 comes around. Now she's got the huge album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. This is the one that's going to launch her into the stratosphere of Superstardom. And the tears she shed in the music video for the single, Nothing Compares 2 U was like remembering her mother, who has now died. She died in 1985 in a car crash on the way to mass right before Sinead signed to this contract and put out the first album. So it's the memory of the mother that provokes the tears and no one knew that. 

Also, everybody made a huge deal out of the idea that it was a Prince song, even though it wasn't a major hit for Prince. And unlike some other artists, she just had nothing to do with Prince except for just, it was a business transaction to cover the song. She was not a protege of Prince. He had nothing to do with her recording of the song, nothing except for just cashing the check. That was his role. 

But yeah, she becomes this massive superstar on that video and she's not going to let up on being political. So she's invited onto SNL for the first time in ’90 with Andrew Dice Clay, who's known for his misogynistic and homophobic and generally not nice guy humor. She's like, oh, hell no. If he's the host, I'm not coming.

Sarah: It is I think one of the time capsules of ‘90 things is yes, Andrew Dice Clay was this incredibly divisive figure. I remember Nora Dunn refused to be on the episode of Saturday Night Live that he hosted. I almost said of Law & Order, I would love to see Andrew Dice Clay on Law & Order. 

Allyson: And Nora Dunn as the prosecutor. And that's the same episode. So they accused Sinead of censoring Andrew Dice Clay. Same year, she had a show coming up at the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey. Now with this show, there's a couple different versions of the story. I think the details matter less than the emotional truth of the story. It was a kind of thing that they did before the shows playing the national anthem. 

So these two people showed up posing as reporters. They were not reporters. And they asked her, how do you feel about the National Anthem? And Sinead being Sinead, depending on which version of the story you believe either said, “I prefer not to have it”, or “hell no, it has nothing to do with my music”. And it was this whole, oh my God, she refuses to have the National Anthem played. She's not going to do the show. 

She actually did the show and there was no actual thing that happened. But it got blown into this whole, here she is now censoring the national anthem. She's ungrateful for her success in America. She's this, she's that, the other thing. 

Sarah: She hates America. 

Allyson: Frank Sinatra, who was there playing at the same venue the following week, threatened to kick her ass. 

Sarah: Frank, as if. As if you could.

Allyson:  Well, yes, as if he could. And you start to get the whole narrative about Sinead being this sort of angry, ungrateful, we gave her all this pop stardom, and this is how she acts.

Sarah: It feels like she's being deemed angry. I'm sure she has plenty of anger, as we've said, but also in this case and so many others, they're like, wow, all these men are so spitting mad at her. She must be threatening them. And no, she's just sitting there having an opinion, you idiots. 

Allyson: So by the time 92 rolls around, we've taken a while to get there, but by the time ‘92 rolls around, you know what I mean? The cancellation is inevitable. If not that night, it would've happened because of everything you're saying. So she had, it was more well-known in Ireland than it was here at that time about the child abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. And she was all fired up about it. Now the picture of the Pope actually belonged to her mother. It was from the Pope's 1979 visit to Ireland. And it was her mother's sort of prize possession that she kept above her dresser.

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Sinead: And when the mom died, she took the photo, which to her represented lies and abuse. And she knew at some point that she would destroy it to make a statement. Now she has this giant platform on SNL. Just like we said, people used to watch the Grammys, people used to watch SNL by the many millions.

Sarah: Yeah, I don't watch SNL. I watch like the clip compilations that fans put together on YouTube, because it's a long show and life is short and I just can't watch a whole episode of Saturday Night Live, you guys. We don't even know how long our natural lifespans are.

Allyson: But this was monoculture.

Sarah: Yeah. These were the days, my friends.

Allyson: Everybody was tuned in to see this and she knew it. Now wshe was also a kid, she had seen Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats go on Top of the Pops. And they were celebrating knocking off, we talked about Grease a little earlier, that song. I think it was Summer Loving.  It had been at the top of the charts, but Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats knocked it off with their song. And to celebrate, they tore up these photos of John Travolta. And when you're a kid watching these things, you're very impressionable. You're like, oh man, that's so kick ass.

Sarah: Yes. I also was imagining for a second that The Boomtown Rats covered Summer Loving. And I was like, yes. 

Allyson: That would be alright. That would be cool. But I think her idea was, yeah, The Boomtown Rats are like a band that's about something, it's not just this sort of pop entertainment thing. That's awesome. And it stuck with her.

Sarah: It's also a classic person from not America, in America, being like it's a Top of the Pops reference, you guys. And we're like, what? We don't care about anything not made within our borders, like literally nothing.

Allyson: Yeah. And then she's also got added onto that she's got all this Rasta imagery on the stage that night when she's performing. Because she's also making a statement that most people missed about the church's role also in perpetuating slavery and racism more broadly. But the issue is that she's singing Bob Marley's song, War, from 1976. It's not a song that's on her album, but it is a song about oppression. And she tells the producers ahead of time, she's going to change some of the lyrics so it’s about the oppression of children, which is child abuse. 

But she doesn't tell them everything. She doesn't tell them everything she has planned. So she goes on for her first set, she does a song from her record that's out. It's another album that came out in ‘92. It's like show tunes, literally, and standards that were meaningful to her as a child. But then when she comes back for the second song she's almost all the way through and then she has to make the statement. She thinks that's what she's there to do. She pulls out the photo of the Pope, she says the word ‘evil’. “Fight the real enemy,” she says. And she tears up the photo, blows out some candles on stage, and leaves. And the whole world gasps. Now it has to be said, she didn't tell anybody what she was doing, so it was hard for anybody really to decipher it.

Sarah: It didn't occur to me until I was told that this was the message that she was communicating it. I was at the reception at the time.

Allyson: There's a couple things, I wonder what would've happened if a male artist at the same time did it. Of course it would be a scandal, but would it have been the same?

Sarah: What if Bono did it specifically? 

Allyson: This is what happens I think in 1992 when women talk and they tell you something that people don't want to hear, kill the messenger. 

Sarah: Something I never realized or appreciated before is that Sinead O'Connor in this is it feels like she sees herself as an activist working through music.

Allyson: Yeah, absolutely. She says that moment on SNL derailed rather than derailed her career. One week after SNL, Joe Pesci is hosting the show. 

Sarah: What a weird cast for this whole thing. I love how the people who comment on this politically come down to whoever SNL has booked these weeks.

Allyson: He comes on for his monologue and he wants to talk about what happened. And he says, “If I had been hosting”, he starts to brag to the audience, “Well, I would've given her such a smack, I would've grabbed her by the…” And the word he says next is actually eyebrows, because it's a cut on her hair being shaved. But if you heard it, you would of course think about Trump and think that he was going to say another word. 

And I wanted that actually to be what I led with and cut the tape right there. Because my point wasn't that Pesci was a misogynist, cause even though he wrote those lines, it was that the culture was misogynist. And that's why when he said that they erupt in applause and laughter, and Sinead gets turned into a punchline.

*recording*  

Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Pesci!

“Thank you very much. It's great to be here hosting Saturday Night Live. There was an incident on the show last week. Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the Pope, and I thought that was wrong. So I asked somebody to paste it back together. Do we have that picture there? Why should I let it bother me? It wasn't my show, it was Tim Robbins's show. But I'll tell you one thing, she was very lucky it wasn't my show because if it was my show, I would've gave her such a smack. I would've grabbed her by her eyebrows. I would've, okay, I'm done. I'm not talking about it anymore. We have a great show. It's Columbus Day. Spin Doctors are here. Don't go away, we’ll be right back.”

Sarah: And this is what we did in 1992. We were just like, “abusing women,  Ha ha ha! Love it.” And also, you just think about Saturday Night Live. I know they're working quickly, but this is not a small show. It's not easy to get a dodgy joke like through to performance. They cut the Stewart sketch for God's sake. 

Allyson: I hope, non-controversial, we can all agree - even the church has agreed now at this point - that the abuse crisis was real. It did happen. It was a global atrocity. It's not like she was talking about nonsense that wasn't actually something that was going on that we all now know to be true. And in fact, a decade later the Boston Globe does all these investigative articles, and they get Pulitzers, and then people make a movie called Spotlight I believe, and they get a bunch of awards.

Sarah: A movie my mother took me to see during the brief period when I was going to be a lawyer and was like, “Would do you defend one of those priests?” over lunch. And to which I responded, “Mom, on Christmas?”  

It's worth pointing out because many adults are walking around today who have no living memory of the moment when this story broke. This was about the same time as 9/11 and people didn't know. It's the same thing as so much else where the knowledge exists, people are aware, but it's just like news outlets are not pursuing it. The information is available, but it has not yet caught fire and made the rounds and created public awareness and sort of people doing the digging to produce substantiated accounts that prove to doubters what's going on.

Allyson:  That's the thing. Look, the reporters were courageous and their meticulous reporting and documentation, they earned the Pulitzer. They definitely, it was important what they did, I don't mean in any way to disparage, but it was also the courage of survivors to come forward and tell their stories. Without that, nothing happens. And those people also risked incredible backlash. Some people are very angry and upset that they talked about this, was like, “oh my god”. Because it's a 10-year period between Sinead and SNL, and when the Boston Globe article starts to come out. But now from our point of view in 2023, she was trying to sound the alarm about something that was happening. And in fact, was evil. 

The other part of this is, Pesci comes on the week after, and then after that she's supposed to go be part of this show at Madison Square Garden, which is a tribute to Bob Dylan. She's planning to sing this song from his Christian era called, I Believe in You. And I hope I have the title right, but it's really a song about not just Dylan's faith in God, but her faith in Dylan. And when she comes out that night to perform, she's introduced by Kris Kristofferson as an artist who's synonymous with integrity or something like that. And this is Madison Square Garden. It's full of thousands and thousands of people. Half the crowd is booing, and half the crowd is trying to drown out the boos, and the song's meant to be performed as a whisper. And she can't do it. 

So you see her on stage. It's heartbreaking to watch. And then instead she goes and starts reciting war again. She breaks down in tears and is escorted by Kristofferson off the stage.  And that is the moment when really she's canceled. In between, there were groups, they're going to steamroll her albums outside of Kristofferson’s office in your Rockefeller Center, and celebrities are weighing in. 

Sarah: We loved doing this. We love steamrolling albums. Who has access to a steamroll? Is there a guy who's just waiting for the next musician to get canceled in the nineties?

Allyson: So many celebrities mocked her during that period. So many celebrities. Madonna was asked what she thought, and uncharacteristically said, “If she has a problem with the Catholic church, there's probably a better way to talk about.” And she did. She published an open letter. And when she talked about her history of abuse in detail and set all the things that were in the background. And that did not, as you might imagine, make people go, “Oh, okay.” 

Sarah: Yeah. Because people never, oh God. Yeah. And do you think that the Madison Square Garden appearance, I feel like the way these narratives would unfold at the time, I don't know if it's still true today. I think that everything is so much faster that it's harder to quantify. But again, to use Tonya Harding as an example, that case as a media circus fascinates me because it had a very hot and fast burnout. It was exactly six weeks long because it began with Nancy Kerrigan being assaulted in Detroit and it ended with the end of the Olympics. 

And then, there was a half-life dribble, but really the American public was allowed to be hyper fixated on something for six weeks and then move on. And it felt like the verdict was delivered when Nancy Kerrigan won a silver medal, and came very close to winning gold, a complicated judging decision there. Tonya Harding could be read as bowing under the pressure and skating badly because she was a bad person, and bad people don't skate to their potential. I feel like that's something we believe is America. And it feels like that's similar where we've successfully broken her spirit. Great work. Let's all move on, chaps.

Allyson: I think a lot of people will get fixated on the moment of the tearing of the photograph, but that's really one tiny moment in a much more expansive timeline. And when I tried to tell that story after she published her memoir, when I tried to tell that story, I realized, wow, I'm having a hard time, I'm pushing up against some of the same kind of resistance that I might have been… How much has really changed in the cultural scaffolding from 1992 to the time in 2021 when I'm trying to reframe this? Now we know all this stuff, so I wanted to bring that in. 

So I did go back and look at the music press at that time and after because what happens is she keeps putting out music, great music, really interesting music, and you never hear about it. Because from that moment on, really all are the tabloid headlines, different controversial things she said and done, blah, blah, blah. But I would say this, my argument isn't that Sinead O'Connor is perfect. It's that she has a right to be imperfect, as do we all, because that's what it means to be a human. 

Sarah: Yes. Although, to be fair, male musicians never fuck up in public and recover from it. 

Allyson: I don’t know about that. 

Sarah: I feel like that's the whole thing and that we love our male musicians, Mick Jagger, has he ever made a good decision? I don't know, but that's not our business and we love him. We love to see him bouncing around like a little demon out there. And the way that he and Marianne Faithfull were treated after they were rated, is a great example of that. Because they were literally in the same room. 

Just with this, without alleging a conspiracy theory, I feel like the kind of explanation for so many of these things, especially in media, which I understand to some extent, is that you don't have to conspire to all have the same motive. And the motive is money. And the way to get money, one of them, is to be like that bitch, Sinead O'Connor, who you all hate already is up to something else. Let's talk about that. She also happens to make music sometimes, but that is not our business. 

Allyson: At that point, she's had this one hit album. It's a massive hit, but it's one hit album. So I think maybe some other stars, and again, I would say male and maybe female to some extent, if you're making a lot of money over a long period of time, for a lot of people, they'll put up with a lot of worse behavior from that person. 

And then there is the third element of it, which is that she's a survivor of horrific abuse and she's been totally upfront and transparent about how it's impacted her emotionally and mentally. And sometimes what you're seeing in the comments that she's made over the years and the actions that she's done over the years that have drawn the most controversy, is that she's often trying to sort of… You know, Joe Pesci said he would've given her such a smack, she's trying to smack back against the shaming and the silencing, and most of all hurting herself often when she does that. 

But I think in a way we need to talk about that, we need to talk about mental illness. We need to talk about how the public expression of trauma is itself sometimes manifested in acting in ways that people are like, whoa, what is she doing? What if we listened and tried to understand what was coming from and supported her. It wouldn't just have had a different impact on her career, but it would've had a different impact on us as a society. She was trying to call out racism. She was trying to call out sexism, she was trying to talk about child abuse. She was trying to talk about mental health. A lot of people are interviewing her like, what about the haircut? Let's talk about the haircut. Can we go to that? They didn't really want to have that conversation. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like when there's a real phenomenon where if someone is in the media and what they're exposing is both their own trauma and or trauma that is befalling, others maybe in a systemic way, it's almost a ritual for us to witness those figures and then bat them away. And I knew that this episode would be like a past You're Wrong About all-stars because I'm also reminded of Lorena Bobbitt. Where like she cut her husband's penis off and chucked it out the window of her car and then the police found it and reattached it to John Wayne Bobbitt.

Allyson: What a triumph. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I don't begrudge him getting his penis back, but it's always fascinating when there's like an incredible effort for something that kind of shows what we find valuable. I was having a Wikipedia night the other night, as you do, and I was reading about how there's this light bulb that's been burning continuously for over a hundred years that's in a fire station somewhere in California. Tons of people have written about it, there's a preservation society for it. It's been moved. Everyone on some level agrees this light bulb, we got to keep this, we got to see how long this light bulb can burn for. And we're undertaking extraordinary efforts to protect this light bulb or to reattach John Wayne Bobbitt's penis. And they're both important. I want him to have a penis.

But also, think about how many human beings are treated with less respect than that light bulb or that penis. And that Lorena Bobbitt basically, that story was about like, wow, what manner and extremeness and incredible and enduring length of abuse can get someone to a place where they are so desperate that the most reasonable thing they can think of to do is cut off their husband's dick and chuck it into a field. 

And what we fixated on as a culture was like, we just made one billion jokes about it. And I can't quite begrudge that because it is funny, whoever found it, took it to the hospital in a big bite container filled with ice. And that's very funny. It could never not be funny, but most of the story was very sad. And we found ways to just not witness that at all. And I think that's like a ritual that we do with stories like these.

Allyson: Now we're circling back to anger and then the question of who gets validated? Who gets believed?. Structurally, this is a reflection of where journalism is right now. Which is what can be told, who can do the telling, what risks are there for the journalist in being transparent or even openly acknowledging how they relate to a story? Something I've definitely been grappling with and thinking about because I guess, as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, I didn't just report it. I also talked about how it affected me personally, how I related to it. It's risky. To me, those felt like really risky choices to make. But I also felt like if I don't, nothing will ever change. It's not a guarantee it will change if I do it, but it is a guarantee that it won't change if I don't.

Sarah: Yeah. That's so beautifully put. I love that. I feel like I should write that down and put it where I can see it every day.  And that really speaks to the coverage that you're talking about, where it's like, if people were to step outside of this alleged objectivity, they could be like, Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the Pope today. We found this very unnerving because we're all supposed to believe in the Pope. Even if you're not Catholic, you're like, he's a Christian religious leader. We have to be nice to him. 

And if people allege horrible things against the Catholic church, then I think there is a basic sense in the world where powerful institutions of whatever kind fundamentally want to protect each other unless they're at war or want the same thing. Because power is sympathetic to power, and I feel like if people were admitting where they were coming from, we would hear that.

Allyson: Well, besides being asked about her hair constantly, of course, after SNL, she was asked about SNL constantly, and she said many times, she did not mean to attack the man or the faith, but the corruption of the institution. That was what she was doing at that moment. They keep asking, oh, do you want to apologize to anybody for what you did? Besides stepping completely the question of whether anyone owes her an apology.

Sarah: Yeah. Including Mark McGrath. I don’t know, I'm sure. Who knows? I don't remember that segment particularly well, but like the idea that what she had done was like, un-showable was just like, come on guys?

Allyson: And yet we can't get past it. You know what I mean? Un-showable, for now on forevermore, you'll not be able to separate Sinead O'Connor and that moment. So the only thing that you can do is provide a different perspective on that moment. So like when people say, for example, in the recording industry, if we just had more women, not unless we actually make systemic change to the industry itself and the way that it values or devalues people. Because otherwise you're going to select for the people who are willing to uphold, right? 

Sarah: Sinead O'Connor seems so remarkable again because she is running so counter to that survival approach of, you know what, you just got to keep your head down and eat shit. And this is how it goes so long without talking about what everybody knows but can't talk about or won’t.

Allyson: Yes. Are things changing? That's a question that comes up. I would throw it to you. Are things changing? 

Sarah: Oh my God. Are things changing? I do, I think so. Even if you can't believe things are getting better, and I think that might be a pollyannaish thing to say, things at least move around laterally. Cultural knowledge of things changes and people change and grow. I do feel like people today, in a kind of remarkable way, given what we know about human history, are expressing a lot of interest in emotional wellbeing and in learning how to be healthy and in raising their children to feel loved and happy. I don't know. 

I went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry recently, which was very exciting. And they have a thing called ‘Mold-A-Rama, I believe, where you watch plastic be injected into a mold and they make a little model for you. So I got five of them. That's how we have historically made our children. You have a child. If you're a boomer, then your parents probably brought you up with the expectation that they were going to decide who you were going to be, and you would then be that. That was the culturally dominant idea. And I'm not saying it isn't now, but no one I know who has kids is fixated on, at least outwardly, the idea of raising them to be a certain kind of person. They worry about keeping them safe. What's going to happen with the climate?

Allyson: From other kinds of people.

Sarah: They worry about these huge apocalypse problems, but when it comes to actually raising their children, what they care about is loving them and helping them to have happiness and mental health and to help others. And I think we're really trying. I think that maybe in the face of how bad things are in so many ways, that can really inspire us and force us to truly love each other. Boy, I did not think I was going to get this optimistic, I thought, but here we are. This is what I really think, honestly.

Allyson: I agree with you in the sense that we have other mechanisms. Social media has obviously positives and negatives, but it didn't exist then. There was no mechanism. You were in the tabloids. It just got repeated. You couldn't really do anything necessarily to fight back. 

Sarah: Yeah. There could be no countervailing force. 

Allyson: Also, again, things like podcasting, the gatekeeping is changing. Even in the industry, people are like, I don't want to be on a major label. What's that going to do for me? They don't have to.

Sarah: They're like, I'm on SoundCloud, I have everything I need. 

Allyson: The economic model still has to be worked out, but I think that we have more. And also, people are talking more about experiences they've had and that's the whole basis of something like #MeToo. Or other social movements that are concurrent. But Sinead had no instinct for self-preservation, career-wise. And she paid a terrible price for it. But it's not to say that she didn't count, I think it did and it did make possible the idea that other people could see, oh, somebody's done that and yes, they had a lot of pushback, but the point is that they did it, not just that they had the pushback. 

And I do think that now younger people will be like, it's hard to explain. I have kids, when I was working on this story in this book, I tried to talk to them about Sinead and they were like, why are people? What? And that's good. That makes me feel hopeful. 

Sarah: Yeah. Which I love. I agree. I think it's like when we hear something about the Victorians. We're like, “Oh my God. People literally did that?” Amazing. 

Allyson: Yeah. That's the reason to keep telling the story, right? So that people understand that did happen. We need to acknowledge it and that's the only way we can move forward and heal from it as a culture. So I do feel like, I think that's what made her dangerous. People are like, I don't want my daughter to see that and think she can do whatever. Same with the idea of power is it's not just top down, right? It's more like an electrical current and sometimes it'll surge and sometimes there'll be an interruption in the flow. And sometimes the system that's designed for something not to happen actually enables that thing to happen. 

Sarah: Yeah.  And then if someone has made an example of, in this way, another one of the effects is to show people that this was clearly something that was very powerful because people were so afraid of it.

Allyson: So this goes to the idea of, what is the artist's role in society? It's a giant question, but it's actually not as big as it may appear. Artists are not entertainers, entertainers entertain, artists are there, I think to get you to think something about something, not think a certain way necessarily, but just to have the ability to think, what do I think? Just to have the question of yourself or to feel, what am I feeling right now? And then I wonder what's provoking that feeling. That's really what I think a true artist does, and that is what I think Sinead did in the nineties. That's what she's continuing to do. She has a new song, part of Outlander. She's doing the theme music. It's coming out this summer. 

Sarah: Oh, I love that. 

Allyson: I think she’s a great artist that would encourage people to seek out some of that music. It's really good. But also that she is a human and not a punchline and not a punching bag. And the more we can recognize that about her, I think the kinder we can be to ourselves.

Sarah: Yes, wow. What has her life been like since? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Allyson: Yeah. So as I said through the nineties, she would bounce back and forth between trying to come back and then having some setbacks in her personal life for a lot of that time.

And then, it was heartbreaking because around the end of 2019/beginning of 2020, somewhere around there, she reverted, is the word I guess that I should use, to Islam, and has a new name but still performs under Sinead O'Connor. The name translates to Truthful Witness, which I think says a lot. And she was doing these quiet, I wouldn't really say it was like a big comeback tour, it's more like she really wants to perform. She is happiest, I think in some ways, when she's doing that. When she's just her in the audience, not all the bullshit around it. So they're mostly on the U.S. west coast, these tour dates, sold out mostly with fans, not industry insiders. People came out to see her. She's performing in a hijab. She's got a small backing band. And her voice now, is weathered and earned. 

To me it's beautiful. It's like when you listen to early Joni Mitchell and then you come back and you see her doing both sides now later on and you're like, damn, she had it, but now she owns it. And that's how I feel about Sinead doing these songs. But then, COVID happened. They're planning to expand the tour to coincide with the 30th anniversary of, “I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got", but that was scrapped by the pandemic. 

And then she went into treatment, mental health treatment, also substance abuse stuff in a longer-term program. But at that time they announced that this long in the works memoir was going to come out in June 2021. It did. And she came and did press interviews for it. But I think it's hard because you get asked the same stuff over and over again. “What about your hair?” “What about SNL?” Blah, blah, blah. It's depressing. You want to tell your story so that you can move forward. And I think that some people were great, some people not so great. 

Under the pressure she made an announcement about retiring, and then took it back. And then put it out again. And then a really tragic thing happened. One of her kids took his own life. He had suffered from, I guess, some mental health issues himself and he took his own life. And to me, that was just devastating. 

As I mentioned, I have kids. I think losing a kid, and losing a kid that way and losing a kid when you're a mother who never really had a mother in any functional sense, the mothering stakes get raised really high. I can speak to my own experience, just unbelievably tragic. Understandably, after that happened, she has been out of the public eye, which I think is a good thing. And I hope that she's getting the support that she needs and deserves. And this Outlander thing just recently was announced, so I think there is a kind of turnout. The documentary came out, my book is coming out. Her story isn't done yet. We have a lot more to hear from her and I hope that we will.

Sarah: Maybe this is the sort of You're Wrong About, is that people, we all hear about them in a moment in time and they end up frozen in that millisecond for us. And part of the truth of human beings that these kinds of stories obscure a little bit is that your story is still going. I imagine it can be very difficult to have your music or your art, whatever it is, remain a source of something that can give a lot to you and that you can process your life through even after it has gotten plugged into a machine the way that it did for her. And to me it means a lot to hear that, hopefully her music is still with her. That wasn't taken from her at any time. 

Allyson: I interviewed her for NPR when I did that story. And she's a very emotionally honest person in a way that few people are. She's hopeful. I feel that she's actually, despite all these things that have happened, she's a hopeful person and I don't think that comes through so much in the way that she's represented. 

Sarah: And that anger, I feel, is about hopefulness. To be able to be angry, is to be able to believe that things could be different than they are.

Recording: How has fame treated you? How has fame been for you? 

It can be a little isolating, because people see you as something other than ordinary, and actually you are just ordinary. And then you're constantly trying to strive to be ordinary and do ordinary things and show how completely ordinary you are. Do you know what I mean? So it can be a weird one. I think money can be isolating. 

Your new album, it sounds happy. 

Yeah. Why is everybody surprised about that? 

No, I don't feel surprised, but I just noticed that it has this happy sound. 

Yeah. I'm 46 years old now. That's a lot easier to be alive, I think, at 46 than it is 26, isn't it? 

Do you sometimes kick yourself for being vocal? 

No, we've never, it's everybody else is doing it for me.

Sarah: And that is our episode. Allyson also mentioned a recent Sinead O'Connor song, The Wolf is Getting Married, and we wanted to share some of those lyrics with you because it's nice to know what she's up to lately. 

“I used to have no wolves around me. I was too free, if that's possible, to be. No, safety is what I mean. No solid foundation to keep me, but the sun's peeping out of the sky where there used to be only gray. The wolf is getting married, and he'll never cry again. Your smile makes me smile. Your laugh makes me laugh. Your joy gives me joy. Your hope gives me hope. And the sun's peeping out of the sky where there used to be only gray. The wolf is getting married, and he'll never cry again.”

If you like hearing us talk about music, you can find a bonus episode on Patreon or Apple+ subscriptions that Carolyn and I did just this month talking about music. What is it? How does it work? What does a pop song do to us, and how and where does all the power packed into those three minutes come from exactly? We solve these eternal mysteries and more, and yes, we do talk about Michael Bolton. 

Speaking of my adventures with Carolyn, we are going to be back on the road starting on April 23rd for more live shows, along with our beloved friend Jamie Loftus, and we'll be talking about bimbos. We will be talking about mall food. We'll be talking about love, and justice, and all the maligned things under the sun. There are still tickets for some of our shows toward the end of our tour. If you want to come see us, we added a second show in Brooklyn on April 28th. We're going to be in Philadelphia on April 30th, and we're going to be in Burlington, Vermont on May 16th. So if you've been putting off a visit to any of these places, maybe this will send you over the edge. Have a water ice, come see the show. 

Thank you as always to this show's producer. Carolyn Kendrick, who is also the Russell from Stillwater to my William Miller, as we travel around America. Thank you for listening. See you in two weeks.